Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications. Some of the fixtures embodying these sources feature a lighting unit, including one or more LEDs capable of producing different colors, e.g. red, green, and blue, as well as a processor for independently controlling the output of the LEDs in order to generate a variety of colors and color-changing lighting effects, for example, as discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,016,038, 6,211,626, and 7,014,336, incorporated herein by reference.
Various light sources may be selectively illuminated based on various input. For example, WIFI-connected HUE LED-based light bulbs, available from Koninklijke Philips Electronics are configured to enable users to create their personal lighting environment wirelessly. For instance, a lamp at a users' home may be logically connected to a remote lamp at their friend's home. After coming home, the user may switch on her connect lamp to cause an “I'm home” message to be sent to the remote lamp in the friend's home. The remote lamp may then illuminate in a manner that notifies the friend that the user has arrived home. As another example, a lamp may be positioned near a user's workspace and linked to her schedule, telephone activity and/or computer activity. Depending on the status of the user—e.g., whether the user is busy, on the phone, and so forth—the lamp may display various colors so that coworkers know whether it is OK to disturb the user. As yet another example, pictures or video may be used to drive selective illumination of a light source. For example, selective illumination of a light source may be driven by to a portion of a digital image or digitally renderable area, and the light source may be illuminated to emit the colors of that portion.
With each of these technologies, a different technique is used to connect an input to a light source. A user wishing to use more than one of these solutions may be faced with a plethora of individual methods of linking an input to a light source that, while perhaps user-friendly on an individual basis, collectively may be cumbersome for the user to manage. Similarly, the user may wish to have manual control of the light sources, without having to separately disconnect each individual light source from its corresponding input.
Thus, there is a need in the art for systems, methods, devices, apparatus and computer-readable media (transitory and non-transitory) to provide easy and uniform linking of selective illumination of one or more light sources with one or more inputs, including network inputs.